Cost of Ford’s Highway 401 tunnel dream would be ‘astronomical,’ experts say

Doug Ford’s tunnelled highway plan will likely cost tens of billions of dollars and be hugely complicated, experts and advocates say.

On Wednesday morning, Ford unveiled his plan to commission a thus-far-uncosted feasibility study to work out how to tunnel a new expressway beneath the gridlocked lanes of Highway 401, possibly stretching from Mississauga and Brampton in the west to Markham and Scarborough in the east.

The premier said the feasibility study would predict the cost and potential scope the scale of the project — but insisted that this was a plan he would push ahead, whatever its results.

That desire to build a project that hasn’t been studied yet is a major worry for Jay Goldberg, the Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“My biggest concern with what we’ve heard about so far is that Premier Ford says there’s going to be a feasibility study, but that he’s going to get this project done essentially regardless of the feasibility study,” Goldberg said. “So, that’s the most concerning aspect for taxpayers.”

The potential cost of the tunnelled project remains an open question.

The government said it won’t publish the cost of the feasibility study until a contract has been awarded to explore the possibility of the route, while the premier said that the study would dictate the cost of the overall project.

There are few directly comparable projects to help estimate the cost. The Big Dig in Boston, for example, cost around $8 billion for a roughly 2.5-kilometre tunnel, while Washington State spent $2.15 billion on 3.2 kilometres of tunnelled highway in Seattle.

Closer to home, transit construction projects in Ontario also cost hundreds of millions of dollars per kilometre.

A recent Toronto Region Board of Trade report found the Ontario Line and Yonge Subway Extension are set to cost around $700 million per kilometre, while the Eglinton Crosstown LRT will come in at $674 million. The Scarborough Subway Extension is projected to cost $600 million per kilometre.

Goldberg, who also studied subway projects in New York City as a comparator, said the cost for a Highway 401 underground could be even higher.

“We’re talking about something like two to three billion dollars per mile (in New York) — they’re talking about 33 miles (of Highway 401 tunnel) — that’s well over $50 billion,” he said.

“Doug Ford didn’t say for example how many lanes this tunnel would be, which would make a huge difference.”

While the costs would be “astronomical” to build under Highway 401, one professor said it is technically possible. The fact it can be done, however, he said, is not a reason to push on.

“My working premise for these type of projects is: anything is technically feasible, within reason,” Matti Siemiatycki, director of the infrastructure institute at the University of Toronto, told Global News.

“We have an international space station, we can build a 55-kilometre if we want to. The question is not whether we can but whether were should. And in this case, the costs are going to be astronomical and the impacts and the benefits are likely not to materialize in terms of resolving congestion.”

The cost of highways more generally under the Ford government is also unclear. A budget of $28 billion for highway expansion has been touted by officials, but how that breaks down has not been easily available.

On Wednesday, Ford committed to sharing the cost of building his signature Highway 413 project from Milton to Vaughan, with shovels set to enter the ground next year. His office told Global News those costs will be made public after contracts to construct it are awarded.

Goldberg said the government’s spending history on transit projects in particular gave him little faith that a tunnelled highway would yield value for money.

“We don’t know the Bradford Bypass, we don’t know the 413 and with the Metrolinx examples, the Ontario Line is already 43 per cent over budget — that’s $16 billion, it’s a ton of money,” he said.

“So if the only track record we have to go on is what’s been going on at Metrolinx, that’s not a very good track record.”

Perhaps anticipating strong pushback to his plan, Ford framed his critics and opponents as naysayers on Wednesday.

“I know this is an ambitious idea and that some people will say it can’t be done or that we shouldn’t even try,” he said.

“But these are the same people who oppose every project, no matter if it’s the expansion of Highway 413, the Bradford Bypass, doubling the size of our subway, it’s no, no, no.”

Siemiatycki pointed to examples around North America, including the Muskrat Falls hydro dam in Newfoundland which saw a federal bailout offered to the province, as a warning.

“It’s one of these circumstances where things that seem bold and ambitious at the outset can become a boondoggle and a quagmire over time,” he said.

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